… his coaches at Shiloh saw something. They were a new staff who came to the program without preconceptions. While Sample wasn’t built like a true hog molly, he wasn’t exactly small, either. He also had a unique blend of speed, power, quickness and tenacity. Some of that came from his basketball background — growing up, he often played against cousins twice his age.
Sample’s coaches believed moving him closer to the line of scrimmage would help him make a bigger impact. They also showed him the numerous defensive linemen around Georgia’s Gwinnett County — often referred to as “The SEC of High School Football” — who were receiving college offers. They believed Sample could be just as good, if not better, than most of them.
That sold him. Sample began transforming his body and honing the abilities he’d need to thrive in the trenches.
At the end of a whirlwind couple of days, after making his debut with the U.S. Men’s National Team, then being loaned to Barnsley FC in the English Football League Championship and immediately hopping a flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Daryl Dike had a moment as unexpected as any.
He found himself in his new home talking to someone from his old one.
The soccer phenom from Edmond never thought he’d find another Oklahoman at the small club in the middle of England.
“I was surprised,” he admitted. “I was caught off guard.”
Melissa Terry felt the same way. The Chickasha native is the chief operating officer of Barnsley’s academy, and she had seen some of Dike’s older siblings play back in the day, then had watched him rise through the collegiate and pro ranks. Still, she could hardly believe the news he was coming to Barnsley.
ana Iwabuchi is not your average footballer. She made her debut for Japan’s most successful women’s club, NTV Beleza, at the age of 14 and won the World Cup when she was 18. At the start of this year she took on the challenge of moving back across the world in the midst of a pandemic, joining Aston Villa in a high-profile transfer.
Perhaps because she has spent her adult life – and a sizeable chunk before it – in the glare of the spotlight, the 28-year-old player is not fazed by many things. “I didn’t feel any pressure,” she says of the fervour that surrounded her emergence as a mazy dribbling teenager with a lethal eye for goal. “All I felt was that I liked playing football. I think I became more aware of the pressure after I became an adult. I only really considered myself an adult in the last two or three years.”
Despite the accompanying Covid-19 difficulties, the newly mature Iwabuchi is convinced her decision to leave INAC Kobe Leonessa in her homeland and head back to Europe – she previously had spells in Germany with Hoffenheim and Bayern Munich – was the right one.
Brown’s goal for the 2021 season was to return an entirely different player, so she took House of Athlete owner, Brandon Marshall — the former Bears receiver — up on an offer to train at his facility in the Miami area.
USA Today High School Sports, Tyler Calvaruso from
… With the first round of this year’s NFL draft in the books, USA Today High School Sports decided to a look at where each first-rounder played their high school football.
Former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger believes footballers have almost reached the peak of their physical capabilities and that improving decision-making will be the next frontier for the sport.
The 71-year-old, who is now Head of Global Football Development for Fifa, told the Telegraph: “We have gone from the football player to the athlete-football player with the measurement of the physical performances.
“The physical time dedicated to improve is now limited. All the players who could not produce the quantity demanded have been kicked out of the game. Maybe the next step is to see what’s going on in the brain. The next step could be speed of decision-making, quality of information taken and the flexibility of decision-making.
Known in Portugal as “the rebel game”, futsal has played a huge role in the football tradition of major nations within the sport. Now a new book argues it could do the same for England
… Multiple cameras—even a good smartphone—are better than any stopwatch if you use the technology correctly. While automatic timing is useful for real team results, the issue with it is you won’t see it used properly and you won’t have everyone in college use the same protocol and system. I can time a sprint to within a hundredth of a second, provided the camera is set up properly and the markings are measured with transparency and with multiple instruments beyond the reliable tape measure.
I am not opposed to having electronic timing as a way to help the appraisal, but the migration away from video is one of the reasons we struggle to assess athletes. How they move as well as how fast they move is everything, and separating them into two distinct assessments is a travesty. With the three video resource articles provided on SimpliFaster, specifically the need to have the right camera setup for video analysis, this is not a big challenge that can’t be fixed with a few hundred dollars.
Athletes will alter the way they fuel for sport by using real-time data to understand the impact of nutrition on performance.
Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are being used by elite athletes and fitness enthusiasts to better understand the impact of blood sugar on performance. A recent study on blood sugar shows diet and exercise must be considered together to improve performance and health, and that chronic high blood sugar negates the impact of exercise.
Admission to the draft’s quarterback sweepstakes was expensive, as the 49ers and Bears learned. Not participating might be even costlier, a lesson some teams might learn the hard way.
When Justin Fuente first became a head college football coach, nearly a decade ago at Memphis, he was confident in all his abilities — except fundraising.
“After about a year and a half,” Fuente said, “I realized I’d better be OK asking people for money.”
Entering his sixth season at Virginia Tech, Fuente and the university’s administration are asking current and prospective donors to fund enhancements to the athletic department’s budget that would make the Hokies more competitive with their peers fiscally and, in theory, on the playing field.
Major League Baseball has an entertainment problem. And when you’re in the entertainment business that’s not good.
Baseball has become a slow game with a lot of strikeouts, walks and occasional home runs. Those are called the “three true outcomes” in today’s game. The plethora of strikeouts is a big issue because they result in no action and no baserunners. For a 14th straight season, pitchers are on pace to set a record for strikeouts per nine innings (9.4). In 1990, the strikeout rate was under 15 percent, and today it’s near 25 percent.
“If I — if we — could change one thing, get one thing under control, for me it would be the strikeout rate,” says former Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs general manager Theo Epstein. Epstein has been hired by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred as a consultant charged with looking for ways to make baseball more entertaining and fan friendly.
MIT Sloan, Ideas Made to Matter, Meredith Somers from
… [Chris] Rider joined MIT Sloan associate dean Ray Reagans and senior lecturer Ben Shields this winter in a three-day exploration and analysis of the intersection of race, gender, and management through the lens of professional sports. The workshop was also taught by Shira Springer, a journalist and lecturer at Boston University’s College of Communication.
“The one thing that we wanted the students to get out of this experience was recognizing how systemic processes work,” Reagans said. “So we’re really using sports to do a lot of heavy lifting: people are emotionally attached, and it allows us to do things that you couldn’t do in other settings.”
Here are three insights for executives on how to think about systemic issues in this area in their own industries.
Diversity at the executive level alone doesn’t solve an organization’s opportunity imbalance
Three years ago, a National Women’s Soccer League team in New Jersey had no working toilets or showers in its training facilities. What turned things around?